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Restore Your Eyesight and End Myopia with Jake Steiner (EP#135)

Natural myopia control pioneer Jake Steiner chats with Mason about lens-induced myopia, psuedomyopia, screen addiction, and taking back control of your health.

Jake Steiner claims he is just another guy from the internet, but for the past 20 years, he's been successfully pioneering natural myopia (nearsightedness) control and built a global community of people seeking to do the same through his website endmyopia.org where he offers a plethora of resources, articles, and courses for free. Prior to his journey of scientific exploration Jake Steiner was very nearsighted with minus 5.00 diopters of high myopia, on a path of his vision getting progressively worse with no end of wearing lenses insight. Today Jake no longer wears glasses, has 20/20 eyesight, has corrected his myopia without the use of eye vitamins, eye exercises, or surgery, and is passionate about providing guidance and resources for other myopes to do the same. One thing Jake touches on a lot in this conversation is screen time. Screen time has become so prevalent and woven into our everyday lives that we consciously need to counterbalance and mitigate its effects to prevent strain on our eyesight and Liver Qi. In TCM the Liver meridian is connected to the eyes and supports blood circulation and the flow of Qi through the eyes. It is the main meridian responsible for healthy vision. Mason and Jake discuss herbs to nourish the Liver, the fundamentals of myopia, lifestyle factors that affect our eyesight, the massive wholesale to retail lense markup, and empowering people to take back control of their health, no matter what the diagnosis. Tune in.

 


 "The muscle spasm I talked about, you can measure it. You can measure your eyesight, and you can find out that it's very variable. You can buy or print out an eye chart, hang it up somewhere, measure out the correct distance you need to be from the chart, and see which line you can read? And then have a four-hour Netflix binge and try that same thing again. You're going to be kind of surprised that you probably can't read that same line anymore".

 

- Jake Steiner

 

 

Jake and Mason discuss:

  • Pseudomyopia.
  • How diopters work.
  • Lens-induced myopia.
  • Natural myopia control.
  • Measuring your eyesight.
  • Acupuncture for eyesight.
  • Eyesight muscle spasms.
  • The Liver-Eye connection.
  • Herbs to nourish Liver Qi.
  • Screen addiction and eyesight.
  • Lifestyle habits that affect eyesight. 

 

Who is Jake Steiner?

Jake Steiner began his journey to reverse his -5.00 diopter myopia 20 years ago. Through a great deal of experimentation, and trial and error to apply theoretical concepts found in clinical journals and peer-reviewed studies, eventually, he was successful in getting back his natural 20/20 eyesight. Over the years, Jake has cataloged the many tools, resources, and experiences that made his myopia recovery a reality. Much of it exists now as part of the resource that is endmyopia.org. Jake created endmyopia.org to help share and connect with his fellow myopes so that more people could get their natural eyesight back. 

 

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN ON APPLE PODCAST 

 

Resources:

Shisandra

Beauty Blend

End Myopia Website

Shortsighted Podcast

Jakes 7 Day Free Course To Fix Eyesight


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Check Out The Transcript Here:

 

Mason: (00:00)

Jake, welcome, man.

 

Jake Steiner: (00:01)

Thanks for having me, Mason. I appreciate it.

 

Mason: (00:03)

Yeah, no, absolute pleasure, absolute pleasure. Bangkok treating you well?

 

Jake Steiner: (00:09)

Bangkok is treating me amazing, actually. I can't complain.

 

Mason: (00:14)

We had a little bit of a jam, I'm enjoying lockdown way too much in my quiet little South Golden suburb, but I've got... I know I shouldn't say it too, I've got too many friends in Melbourne and Sydney and other places in the world who are not enjoying it. Let's not go into that. I don't mind if you want to go into how awesome Bangkok is, though. That'd be cool to hear a little bit of... we'll get into that. But I want to hear about just eyesight, glasses. I want the whole shebang. Where did you start out? Digging into this, when was your moment when you realised you'd... or did you feel like at some point, was it the feeling of being hoodwinked by an industry or something that got you spurred on? Or what was your motivation to start restoring your eyesight?

 

Jake Steiner: (00:59)

You're getting me in a totally different angle on this now. So I started wearing glasses when I was maybe 12-ish, somewhere around there. I'm super old, so I lived in a time before screens. So I didn't get into glasses till school, till well into school. And so maybe 12-ish, somewhere around there, my parents took me to an optometrist, optometrist said, "You need glasses," I got classes. And from there every year or two or so, I got stronger glasses. And when I started out, I played water polo, which I've really enjoyed. You're in water that's too deep to stand in, so you're treading water, and you're throwing and you're catching a ball that you're only allowed to touch with one hand. It's somewhat intense and it requires decent eyesight, you got water splashing around, stuff's going on.

 

Jake Steiner: (01:51)

And as my eyes got worse, the ball turned into just more of a yellow outline that just kept getting bigger because it's just a blurry thing. And I was trying to kind of aim at the middle of it, because you got to catch it with one hand. Eventually I couldn't play anymore, because you can't really wear contacts and glasses doesn't work. And I turned into more of a introvert nerd type in retrospective. Because kids wouldn't pick me for sports because once I started getting into glasses... once you wear glasses, you get afraid of balls flying because you don't have peripheral vision. You can't see stuff that comes flying at you from the side nearly as well. And if a ball hits your face and your glasses go flying, you just can't see anything. So it makes you kind of vulnerable and you act more afraid of your moving environment. And that sort of reflect in how you just behave.

 

Jake Steiner: (02:47)

So I went from just being a kid to being more of an outsider because glasses. On hindsight. At the time, I didn't realise. I started reading a tonne, got into a lot more of the "nerdy stuff," computer stuff, that started merging. And then I worked glasses till I got to minus five and I was stock trading and doing just screen stuff a lot. And then one day I found myself in... somewhere in Asia and looking for taxi and I couldn't see, and I went back to the optometrist and they said, "You need stronger glasses," and I said, "Why?" And they said it's genetic. And that was just a moment where I was like, it can't be genetic. Because it's a problem that didn't exist to this extent 50 years ago. My parents don't wear glasses, my grandparents don't wear glasses. The genetic answer doesn't make sense. So I went to library and I started researching and I found out that short-sightedness, nearsightedness, myopia is not at all a genetic condition. It's a 100% environmental and all the glasses thing, all my youth that I spent in glasses was completely pointless and unnecessary.

 

Mason: (04:00)

I mean, a lot of things are jumping out at me, but the one that really annoys me the most is when a professional, a doctor, an optometrist in this setting, that they're so confident in the talking point that they've been given from their professors or their institution and they don't get the severity. And just how irresponsible it is to spout something that they don't actually know for themselves is true. And they just say, "No, it's genetic. Literally, this changes your whole life. You're crazy. You think you can do something about this?" Well, do you know it's genetic? "Yeah, yeah, of course. My institution told me. I paid heaps of money to be there. And they're really smart people. I'm not looking into it myself." That happens so much and so many people's lives goes... it's a curve ball because of it, unnecessarily.

 

Jake Steiner: (04:52)

Yeah. It's amazing. And my parents are both medical doctors, and I'm generally not against modern medicine in a lot of ways. There's amazing stuff that they're figuring out. But when it comes to not acute symptoms, like long-term just stuff, so often there is the profit motive runs away with the story, right? Glasses, the wholesale cost for lenses is like 2 to $5. Hundreds of dollars in a retail store. They make on average about 5000% profit on selling glasses.

 

Mason: (05:28)

Far out.

 

Jake Steiner: (05:31)

It's crazy. It's crazy. It's crazy.

 

Mason: (05:33)

That's insane.

 

Jake Steiner: (05:33)

It's crazy. People pay 200, 300, $400 for glasses. It costs nothing. It costs the optometrist nothing.

 

Mason: (05:41)

Wow. I mean, not to say there's an inherent corruption there in people, like it's a thing that you trust your institution, you trust the entire medical institution's good-willed, et cetera, and probably morally and ethically you probably get in and you go, "Oh, it's just the way it is. And that's just the benefit. This is how I get my payday after putting in so much energy to become a doctor and become an optometrist and pay the service to society." But if you were able to get rid of the survivalist in nature, like, "I need this to pay for all this stuff I've gone and... I need to pay my kids and my family and all these..." If you take all that away and you just look at it objectively, very unethical doing that.

 

Jake Steiner: (06:30)

Yeah. And okay, here's the weird thing, and before we fall too deep into the rabbit hole, I always recommend people go to Google Scholar. If anybody's not familiar, scholar.google.com is the Google search engine that only shows you clinical research studies. If you don't want to look at normal internet where who knows what you're getting for results, it doesn't mean that a scientific study is correct, it just means you're only looking at those. You're looking at peer-reviewed studies. So whenever I hear a podcast with a crazy dude from the internet claiming that a whole entire trusted institution is wrong, I always go there first. Because I'm like, "Is there any basis to this at all?" Super helpful, because there's so much stuff out there that is maybe a little bit kind of crazy, who knows? So Google Scholar, super handy. Just go over there, type in pseudomyopia, P-S-E-U-D-O myopia. That means not real near-sightedness.

 

Jake Steiner: (07:33)

And that tells you, if you just spend five minutes, see there are 20,000 plus search results of all clinical studies that say your near-sightedness starts out as a muscle spasm. And it's kind of mind-blowing and you don't have to, but you can certainly, dig into studies that tell you there's a round, circular muscle around a lens in the front of your eye that shapes the lens. So the closer you look at something the more that muscle tightens up and the more it bulges the lens out that you get clear, close-up vision, focuses the light in the back of your eye on your retina. And the further you look at something, the more that muscle relaxes and what happens, super short version is, if you're a kid studying in front of a book for many, many hours or now people just living in front of screens, that muscle gets stuck. It's just a muscle spasm. It's not designed to be in this super tight mode that it's in when you're looking at a phone for countless hours every day. And it doesn't completely relax.

 

Jake Steiner: (08:37)

So since it controls that lens, it not relaxing means the lens doesn't go back into full distance vision. It's just like if you turn off the autofocus on a camera and leave it in close-up and then you point the camera at a distance and things are blurry. That's exactly what happens in your eye. If the optometrist at that point said, "Go camping for a weekend and then come back," you'd have a better result after the camping. And it's super important because myopia is not genetic. It starts out as pseudomyopia. Google Scholar, easily 20,000 search results explaining this in fish. I don't know how they figured that out fish, in birds, in monkeys, and in humans, anything that has our kind of eye has that same response. I just wanted to put that out upfront. So when people are listening, they're not dragged into this not knowing what's going on.

 

Mason: (09:34)

Yeah. I mean, and before we go into your... I don't even know whether protocols is the right word, but all the insights and the work that you do, which I'm really... it's been a few months or a couple of months since I really dived down through your website and was like, "Oh, holy shit, this is my..." Because I've had a lot of people who have come and have wanted to be on the podcast. I think we reached out to you. I think Alex found you and reached out to you. Didn't want to make everyone think that you were out there reaching out, when I think we did it. A lot of people though, reaching out to be on the podcast with eyesight healing techniques. And I know it's always, it's always pretty stretching and do the eye movements and all that kind of stuff, but yours was... I'm looking forward to getting the refresher, it's going to kind of be new, but I remember looking into it being super impressed and kind of excited. It was just very... I don't know, it had a connectivity to life rather than just being this isolated treatment that was completely packageable and sellable in a course or something like that.

 

Mason: (10:40)

But just put out there again, I realise, we're talking about the optometry industry, and I know that even though we're going to go into some solutions right now, I know there are people who are just kind of happy to have glasses and just grateful for that opportunity when their eyesight goes. Even if it is something that you know is lifestyle based or environmentally based, it's not just an inevitable deterioration of your genetics. So gratitude there for everything that's possible and the support that that can can give. But man, that realisation, do you think is it scary for most people? Do you think realising that it is inevitably your choices and the way that you've just fallen into living that has determined the deterioration of eyesight and that you have... it's fully within your capacity to get it back on track? What do you think is the biggest thing that stops people there just jumping in straight away and doing it? Is it daunting, don't believe it, you know?

 

Jake Steiner: (11:41)

Okay, somebody explained this to me one time that finally made sense, because I don't talk about this even to my friends, because I know people don't care and it makes me frustrated. But this guy said, make a list of the 10 most ongoing important things in your life, pressing, that you're doing, or you have to do, or you really wish you could get done. He's like, 10 things. And he's like, the first three is how far are you going to make it. And maybe that's extreme and maybe that's not right, but it stuck in my head as eyesight is number 15, right? Like you'd love to run a triathlon and you'd love to pick a painting and you'd love to travel to New Zealand. For you I guess that's not that far. And then, yeah, sure [crosstalk 00:12:33]-

 

Mason: (12:32)

I'm pretty far at the moment, man. [crosstalk 00:12:35].

 

Jake Steiner: (12:36)

[crosstalk 00:12:36]. Oh man. Yeah. But so it's like, it would be interesting to do, but you know what? You get up in the morning and it takes you exactly 40 seconds to pop in your contact lenses. And that problem, number 12 on the list, is solved. It'd be nice not to pop them in, but it's not that big of a deal. The alternative I'm suggesting is you learning about biology a little bit and questioning your day-to-day habits a little bit and coming up with better things to do with part of your free time and becoming aware and sort of biohacking a thing that's just always been neglected. And that's kind of a big undertaking for, "I'm saving those 40 seconds in the morning." You know what I mean? I think that's kind of the, "I already fixed that." [crosstalk 00:13:27]-

 

Mason: (13:27)

I think the gravity of it though... I completely get it. I mean, it's something I'm constantly doing. There's things that are obviously massively important to me and to my health and I berate myself that I don't... I'm not creating space for this one little aspect of my health. But got kids, got a kid and another kid on the way, business is going off. But I think the complete sympathy for people, or empathy, if that is the case, but I just think this is a great reminder to be like, "Don't let go. Just hold onto that number 14 and really create a structured... within your life. Make sure you're not just getting stuck, washed away within your life just grinding." If you can get to that point where you can automate particular things, get down that list, and make sure... and have faith that there's going to be a point where you go like, "Ah, okay, I'm ready. I'm really ready. And I've got the space to kind of nail this now."

 

Mason: (14:27)

I mean, just hearing you talk about the difference as a child and just that that's... I'm sure that's altered the way that you operate in the world, the way that you think the way you relate to your body, due to maybe not engaging in sports and being as active for particular reasons. Not for particular reasons, for that reason. I think the gravity and just the opportunity of doing things like this is, it comes down to everything, is like with our herbs that we have at SuperFeast, it's like if you start to engage with the capacity, you actually have control of how the chi in your organs flow, and you can, with your lifestyle and herbs and movement, you can generate your own energy. You do not have to be reliant on external sources of energy. And just that's like too huge for some people to take on and it takes them a long time to come to terms with that. To come to terms with something like the eyesight, being able to turn your eyesight around, I mean, it's exciting, but yeah, I can completely imagine why people don't sink their teeth in immediately.

 

Jake Steiner: (15:36)

Okay, for example, I've poked around your website and I'm like, that made it on my list of, "That would be interesting, but will I ever get there?" You know what I mean? Realistically, I'm like, "Okay, I'm in Thailand, shipping, understanding how much of it makes sense? How will it affect my life?" Who knows, right? It's in the same spot on the list, where I'm like, I'm sure it could make a difference but how big is my motivation? And when it comes to eyesight, I'll throw this in there, one part is it changes who you are. In just simple examples, if you wear glasses, when you're walking outside, you're looking at the ground because you don't have peripheral vision, you can't look straight ahead.

 

Jake Steiner: (16:22)

A person without glasses, or if you have contacts you can, you can see the ground from your periphery. So you're walking in the world, not necessarily staring at the ground. If you wear glasses, you're walking, you're looking at the crowd. Your experience of the things in front of you is the ground. You don't think of it because that's just your life, but it would not be the same if you're not wearing glasses. If you're talking to people, your eyes look through the centre of the lens, because that's the optical centre, that's where your best vision is. So your eyes are trained just to look just through that one point. Versus people who don't want glasses who have a much more fluid eye movement and neck movement. So when you're talking to people, you appear to be kind of stiff and weird, just slightly, just so slightly that nobody's consciously aware of it, but people treat you differently because you are a little bit weird behind the glasses. Potential tendency to make you a little bit more introverted, potential tendency to view yourself differently because you are different because you kind of have a weird... you're not right in how you're interacting.

 

Jake Steiner: (17:31)

Another thing, for example, I spend three months of the year kite surfing. Not now anymore, apparently, but I used to. Since I don't wear glasses. And I still catch myself going, "Unbelievable that my body can do that." Because I was so believing that I'm clumsy and fearful and I don't have the athletic ability because the lenses, no peripheral vision, my eyes are stuck looking through the centre of the lens, that I don't have the confidence to move. The fine motor control, your brain just goes, "Whoa, careful." None of this works very well. Going from there to not wearing glasses, I spent years paragliding. I lived in Nepal, paragliding. Crap I would have never done, never, ever, ever, ever. Because I don't believe that I can. Now I'm fine. But it took a lot of years and habit changes and just exploring how does it make my life different, that made this journey of going from glasses to no glasses, super worth it. Because it's like, I got a second life. I went from this nerdy dude who lived behind screens, trading stocks, to having all sorts of interesting physical, outside experiences that are super amazing, that I would have probably never had.

 

Mason: (18:53)

After you went to the optometrist and they said, "It's genetic, you're getting worse. You need," whatever, thicker glasses, whatever the terminology is, what was the first thing that you went and did when you were doing research and you started putting a technique to action or something like that, or an insight to action? What was the first thing you did that then actually yielded results and started putting real faith in you that you can do this?

 

Jake Steiner: (19:20)

That was a long time. First, I bought everything that was out there. I bought the books, whatever courses. First I found pseudomyopia. So there's two things I found. One, I found pseudomyopia, it's a muscle spasm. The cause of your near-sightedness is a muscle spasm. It's not a question. This is in optometry journals. It's weird that the retail optometrist doesn't know what the academic optometrist writes about. This is-

 

Mason: (19:54)

Just conveniently doesn't know, just be like, "No, no, just don't even let it in. I just want to be happy over here selling my 5000% increased product."

 

Jake Steiner: (20:07)

Not to knock all optometrists. There are awesome optometrists, for sure. There are helpful optometrists, optometrists that know this, there are optometrists that are willing to support you. Some of them are in a tough spot because the regulatory boards don't let them talk about this. That's a whole big topic. They're not bad people. It's just I hold a grudge because that really put me in a direction. so I found pseudomyopia and then I found another terrible thing, terrible, terrible thing, on Google Scholar. You type in lens-induced myopia. And that will piss you off a little bit because as the name suggests, once you start using the treatment they sell you, your eyesight will get worse because of the treatment. Not because of genetics, not because blah, as soon as you start wearing the glasses... and I can explain if you want, but that's kind of a long biology topic, your eyesight will get worse because of the glasses. Again, [crosstalk 00:21:07]-

 

Mason: (21:07)

Because of the spasming? Are we still on spasm? Or does it deteriorate in any way?

 

Jake Steiner: (21:12)

Worse. Much, much worse. The eye is like a fluid-filled ball, right? And it's not solid, it's not like a bone, so it's never perfectly round. And you've got the lens in the front and the retina where the signal is received in the back, and between there's fluid and a skin basically. And it's not a perfect one, it's just held together. It has a mechanism built-in that adjusts its length, like how much distance is between the lens in the front and the retina in the back. And when you're a baby, you start out hyperopic, like the eyeball is too short, you can't see up close clearly. But then that mechanism, that works throughout your whole life, adjusts the eyeball in length that you have perfect vision. And that Megan doesn't always works. And there's a few different things that run it, pretty well understood in science. When you put on glasses, what happens is, glasses moved the light further back in your eye, because you have a muscle spasm, you're stuck in close-up mode, the light focuses just in front of the retina because it wants to be in close-up. And what the lenses do, is they just move the light back a little bit. So it's basically... it's making it so despite the muscle spasm, the light focuses in the right spot for distance.

 

Jake Steiner: (22:28)

Problem with that is it's not perfect. Glasses are not... they're 16th century technology. So some of the light focuses behind the retina and that is the signal that tells the eye that it's too short. It's called hyperopic defocus. You can look it up on Google Scholar. So a little bit of the light focuses behind the retina and then the eyeball, that mechanism in the eyeball, "Well, crap, I'm too short," and the eyeball physically elongates. And that's why a year later you need new, stronger glasses because the eyeball has compensated for the lens.

 

Mason: (23:06)

So [crosstalk 00:23:08]-

 

Jake Steiner: (23:07)

Literally you're selling new glasses. Because of the glasses, you're selling more glasses.

 

Mason: (23:17)

I mean, that makes sense. I'm sure for a lot of people, that's a bit of a shock, but it makes sense. If you don't use it, you lose it. And it's just, I think it's kind of coming out more in... well, consider the alternative, but even in some circles around healing body and trauma to the body, broken bones, [inaudible 00:23:39] like strains, rather than do complete mobilisation, those people that are getting the best results are using... obviously they're putting... they're not just taking the cast off and letting it go wild. They're putting some care into it, as I'm sure we'll hear about your process here, but it's like, no, don't just mobilise the thing that needs healing that needs to move. And then you get the chi moving in there, you get the blood flow going in there, you can eventually heal it. So it sounds like it's a similar connection that you're making there. All right, so you're discovering all these things and I'm sure you're feeling very good about what you've been told so far on your eyesight journey?

 

Jake Steiner: (24:18)

It was unbelievable because I found all this stuff and I printed stuff out and I went back to the optometrist. I'm like, "What is this?" And the second one I went to just kicked me out. Literally, they were just like, "Out of here." I'm like, "This is your journals. Literally this is..." And they were just like, "Out. Out." And from then I just kind of... a lot of Endmyopia is a bit of a grudge I had.

 

Mason: (24:46)

I can imagine.

 

Jake Steiner: (24:46)

I bought all the books. I bought all the books, I bought all the stuff. I was travelling a lot at the time because I was sort of retired. I tried eye acupuncture, I tried eye exercises, I did the Nepalese healers. Tried all this stuff because I assumed, understanding that my eyes are not broken, that somebody figured this stuff out. I don't even have a cool beard, right? On the website a claim I do, but it's a total lie. You have a cool beard.

 

Mason: (25:15)

Yeah. Sorry, I can't be with you on that one.

 

Jake Steiner: (25:17)

Yeah, I know. I'm screwed. So I tried all this stuff and it wasn't working and because of my background, I analysed stuff. From what I do, is the only way you make money is if you really, really, really understand what is going on. And I'm like, "Okay, cause. How do these ideas, how does this book, address the cause? I figured out the cause already. How does it address the muscle spasm? How does it address the lens, the lens-induced myopia part?" And when I started looking at it that way... because first I wasn't. The first year, I was just like, "Yay. Let's try all this stuff." Is how does the acupuncture address muscle spasm and the lens making my eye longer? It doesn't. And then how does the eye exercise, how does this Bates method thing address it? It doesn't.

 

Mason: (26:09)

Bates, I was going to ask you about.

 

Jake Steiner: (26:11)

Yeah, so the problem there for me, as a weird German, analytical, boring guy, I'm really not good at not being able to connect the cause and the treatment. I want to understand. You have to understand it, because how can you treat it without understanding what's wrong in the first place? And I couldn't find a thing that started with, "Here's the cause." I couldn't. And it's weird, and I feel weird, because I have imposter syndrome to some extent. Because it can't possibly be that my dumb ass... I'm not a doctor, I'm just barely... I wasn't even good at stock trading, I was just... whatever, it was a good market. I don't know anything. How can it be that there is no... I'm never going to figure this out. There was a period where I was just like, "Ugh."

 

Jake Steiner: (26:59)

But the logical idea is that the mechanism in the eye is the name of the game. Like, my eye just got worse because I put on the lenses, eye got longer. There are studies that show that the elongation of the eyeball is not a one way thing, the eye just adjusts. It gets shorter, too. So my thought was, if I wear weaker glasses, slightly, slightly weaker glasses, then instead of the light focusing a little bit behind the retina, it focuses just a little bit in front of the retina, and that same mechanism is going to shrink my eyeball back to the correct size. Giant leap, right? But there was plenty of science showing that the elongation is permanent, it's just an adjustment. It's not growing longer, it's just changing like a football shape. But both ways. And that thing works your whole life.

 

Jake Steiner: (27:49)

So I started wearing weaker glasses and I didn't know what I was doing. This was almost 20 years ago. It's like the first guy discovering that lifting weights makes you stronger. It was like that. I just wore a weaker glasses. And they were two weeks in hindsight, like I went from minus five to minus three, couldn't see shit. I remember I went to Laos with those glasses. I threw away the old ones because I'm just like that. Couldn't see anything. It was terrible. It was a stupid idea. But I kept wearing those because I'd thrown away the stronger ones, and eventually I remember I was sitting in a subway somewhere, Hong Kong, I think, one day, and I'm sitting there and I could read the map on the other side. And it was just a sudden realisation that I could do that. I never was able to do that before. And I was like, "Crap, this is working."

 

Jake Steiner: (28:39)

But there was a big period where I just kind of... I don't know why, I just kept weighing those minus threes, life, it sucked. My vision was just... it was not fun, but somehow I couldn't get myself to go back. And there was just that moment that was like, "Well, this crap is really working," and then from there, some friends got involved. And from there, in the intervening 20 years, so many people tried different variations of this, that by now we have a system that one diopter a year. Every three to four months, you can buy a weaker set of glasses and that's all you need. And your vision just improves. Super short, that's the answer to the whole thing. This is why there's not really anything to sell. There's no money to make off of it because the solution... it's a theory, right? It's an unproven theory. Because testing the eyeball length is not cheap, doing it consistently is not cheap. We've done it in the past, but there's not enough evidence for me to go definitively, right?

 

Jake Steiner: (29:38)

I'm saying, you could try this and play with it, I'm not responsible for your result. But tens of thousands of people have done it. We have a huge Facebook group and forum and all kinds of stuff. And I'm super simplifying, there's tonnes more little details, just like lifting weights makes you stronger, there's more details. But it boils down to just small adjustments to the strength of your lenses.

 

Mason: (30:02)

Okay. Because I still have no idea of the structure of what you're offering, but I do remember now that you had a community and that's always... I think that's a good sign. How many people did you say is in the Facebook group?

 

Jake Steiner: (30:14)

22,000 or so, thereabouts.

 

Mason: (30:17)

Yeah. I mean, Facebook is savage. To have a group with that many people, you've got to like... I like hearing that because having a group like that revolving around distinctions, it might be somewhat of a system, but I like what you're saying. It's kind of the same way we do herbalism, tonic herbalism. I'm like, I don't want to be a clinical herbalist. This is a herbalism style, like a folk style of herbalism for the people that isn't rigid, so rigid instruction that it doesn't fit into the romance of the lifestyle and the kitchen and so on and so forth. And I feel like, that's what I'm hearing there that it's just... take the edge off. It makes it more accessible. But you've got free guides and stuff that people can go get, right? Just to start getting them into biology and see the studies and all that?

 

Jake Steiner: (31:10)

It's free. We have a few courses that nobody needs to buy. If you want to support the resource, I'm trying not to pay all the bills. It's not that cheap actually to run out of pocket. It doesn't make me happy if I have to. That is more structured where I offer support, but they're not necessary. I've written like 1,200 articles on the site. Nobody needs to spend money to do this. And the basis is simple, the practical approach takes a little bit of... Once you dive into it, you're going to end up having a lot of questions, like, "I have astigmatism. I have presbyopia. I have this, I have that." That's why I've written a tonne of stuff. So all the things I've figured out with the help of lots of other people, the last 20 years is on there, it's free. There's no paywall, there's no nothing.

 

Jake Steiner: (31:56)

And then you dig into that a little bit, and then you pop up in the Facebook group, which is super active. We've never manipulated stuff, it's just the people in there are the people that found it. And we have a big forum that's bigger than the Facebook group where people are having discussions, trying other stuff. [inaudible 00:32:16]. And so it's an evolving, ongoing thing.

 

Jake Steiner: (32:18)

For me, the most interesting thing is once you dig into it, you start going, "A big problem is that I'm addicted to my stupid phone." I have replaced all of the fun things I do with playing on my phone. Eventually, and people don't need to, but the fun part of this whole thing is going, "I need distance vision time to improve my site." I pop on slightly weaker glasses or contact lenses, but now I need to go do something. Birdwatching, tennis playing, bike riding, something that is going to be less fascinating than just picking this up and scrolling through it.

 

Jake Steiner: (32:52)

And to me, I think the funnest part, and who cares because addiction is not my topic, but people slowly going, "Well crap, I do spend six hours on my phone, it says. And I don't have any hobbies anymore. And I could..." And for me personally, that's kind of the super fun bit, if you stop in the forum, sometimes people are talking about how they're rediscovering the boring-ness and fascinating-ness of life that starts with not turning on a screen.

 

Mason: (33:23)

I've got a friend, Jake, he's been on the podcast before. He teaches bushcraft and survival skills and he's an activist as well. But he spends a lot of time in town. And then he was just telling me every now and then he goes bush for however many weeks, three weeks. Whenever I'd talk to him after he was doing that, or if he'd be giving a little update every few days, he's just like, he goes, "The first thing I noticed is all my senses come back online." And he goes, "And my eyesight, all of a sudden, starts becoming sharper, I didn't even realise how fuzzy it was spending all that time." And he's not even a big computer or a phone guy, but even just for him, he gets into the bush and... I mean, that's what walkabout is, you go and you look and you just walk for as long as you need to release the tension from your body. Which of course is going to be connected to the eyes as well.

 

Mason: (34:25)

And so they say, they just watch that breeze move the trees up on the mountain, on the ridge line, or we'll just watch the waves and just watch the sand on the horizon, and eventually that... My indigenous mates who talk about that, they talk about that pulling out the trauma as you go along, because you're looking at things that your brain goes, "I don't have to remember this," but so as you start spitting up... in this walkabout state, you start spitting up all the traumatic memories that create the tension for you, that natural vista that's off in the distance plucks off all that trauma. And that can release the tension from your body. And that just ties exactly into what you're talking about here. And what a gift to give people, remembering just the importance to balance out all that close screen time with getting out there into something where you're looking far away.

 

Jake Steiner: (35:21)

I'd love to do that. I'd love to do that. We should do that. My audience is so diverse and from so many different places, there's... I spent a fair amount of time in Hong Kong, or I used to before Hong Kong became a forever locked island. There's nowhere to go. Real estate is so expensive you live with your parents or you live in this tiny hole. And then every time I go there, people are on the phone, on the subway, on the bus, walking to the subway to the bus. They're on the phone in the bar, in the restaurant with friends, they are just glued to those things. And then when I have people that participate from Hong Kong, they go, "Man, I am feeling like an alien. I put my phone down and I'm the only one with their phone down. And I'm just alone in the city, surrounded by people on the phone." And I'm like, that's kind of traumatising. So being in a place where you can have a walkabout, for one, that's a brilliant start.

 

Mason: (36:24)

It's literally going for a walk and looking into the distance, right?

 

Jake Steiner: (36:28)

Yeah. Yeah.

 

Mason: (36:31)

When you boil it down, I'm sure there's many little techniques and things that pop up in the forum or in... I mean, you've got a bunch, I'm looking at the courses now. Child myopia, prevent and reverse, myopia post-LASIK, there's some pretty chunky ones in there, like 14 week programmes-

 

Jake Steiner: (36:56)

Not available for the most part though.

 

Mason: (36:58)

Is that because of availability of spots?

 

Jake Steiner: (37:01)

Because I do support and I've got... especially this year, I'm super busy. In that whole course thing, there's only one or two that are actually available. Again though, you don't need any of them. There's a seven day free email guide that kind of... because it's such a thick topic, like where do I start? And the website has so much stuff on it that it kind of walks you through start with understanding why. And people get mad at me for this because they just want the steps. But I'm like, the reason you wear glasses is because you just trusted a thing. I'm not looking that trustworthy and I don't try to make it about trust, so I'm like, understand the cause first, take 10 minutes, an hour, a week, however much you need to understand what's up with the biology. And then people get pissed because they're like, "Just give me the steps. I believe you."

 

Jake Steiner: (37:52)

But I'm like, get what it is. And so the seven day guide walks you through the here's what's going on and here's how you can question this whole thing in the first place. And then here's the basic stuff. And then I release you into the wild of website and community and stuff. And that's really all you need. So I'm kind of anti-selling the courses, but I really don't think that's where you need to start. It's more of a slightly weaker pair of glasses. And I have a podcast, but I only do improvement stories. Whenever there's somebody who surfs, for example, on there, I'm like, that's going to be good. Because if you surf, you have motivation to rid of those stupid things, because contacts out there, you lose a contact lens, it's a lot less fun experience coming back. And those people improve really quickly and really consistently, because there's no excuse. If you're in the bush, if you're doing that kind of thing, if that guy wore glasses, I promise... well, I shouldn't promise, but he would take to something like that so easily because he needs the eyesight and he uses it.

 

Mason: (39:05)

And I know what you mean by promise. I mean, you're probably just watching that there's a pattern. If people apply themselves, you see the pattern of improvement. Weaker glasses, time off the myopically looking at a screen or books or video games or whatever it is. Are there any other little cool add-ons that you're like, maybe they're not the Big Kahuna in the protocol, but just little things that help improve? I'm thinking as well, there're a lot of people listening, wanting to... like the prevention. This is just something beautiful, even though you're preventing eyesight from deteriorating or becoming myopic, there's a beautiful... these are all just beautiful things to add into a lifestyle anyway, to keep you sharp and loving life.

 

Jake Steiner: (39:51)

True. You can measure your eyesight. The real starting point... and that's the seven day guide thing, too, the difference between hearing this and being like, "Huh, that's an interesting topic," and then forgetting about it a half hour after you listened to it, and having an experience, is you can measure your eyesight. The muscle spasm I talked about, you can measure it. You can measure your eyesight and you can find out that it's very variable. You can buy or print out an eye chart, hang it up somewhere, measure out the distance that you need to be at the right distance from the chart and see how your eyes... Which line can you read? And then have a four hour Netflix binge and try that same shit again. And you're going to be kind of surprised that you probably can't read that same line anymore.

 

Jake Steiner: (40:40)

That experience of going, "Well crap." Or if you eat a big pizza and drink a Coke and get a giant insulin spike, try to read that chart and see what happens. Or be stressed out and angry and read that chart and see what happens. If you do that and if you get really into it and you just keep a little log, because you're going to forget. What line could you read and what was the connecting... where were you at in that moment? You notice that your eyesight is connected to your diet, is connected to your mood, is connected to your interactions, everything. And if you start doing that... and for example, if somebody wears glasses and their glasses are just giving them perfect vision, you can take them off and the way diopters work, so the strength of the glasses is just a distance measurement.

 

Jake Steiner: (41:30)

And I don't want to get too far into that, but it's just, if you take a book or a screen and you just put it... how close do you have to put it for it to be perfectly sharp? And then how far can you get it from your eyes to where it's still perfectly sharp? And then once you start to see the tiniest bit of blur, measure that distance, however many centimetres, 100 divided by the distance equals diopters. So if you can see 50 centimetres, 100 divided by the 50 is two. You need glasses that are two diopters to have perfect distance vision.

 

Jake Steiner: (42:06)

So if you are a two diopter person, you're going to see the 50 centimetres perfectly. But now eat the pizza or now try to do that in a nice, natural, full spectrum light, you're going to see 60 centimetres. Try to do that in a shitty lit fluorescent room, you're going to see 40 centimetres. The numbers are not exact, but it's going to vary that way. And you're going to be like, "Fluorescent light is shit for my eyes." Because you're going to be able to measure the... And once you get into that rabbit hole, then it's tempting. Because then you're like, "Oh crap. I don't have to go to the optometrist. I don't need to get measurements there. This thing is variable. And it's another way for me to quantify how I'm doing with my body."

 

Mason: (42:52)

And it is all connected. Always. I was curious when you brought up acupuncture, whether you've ever had someone dive in with you about that connection between eyes and sight and muscle tension and the liver much. Because it's like, it's been popping up in my mind a little bit.

 

Jake Steiner: (43:12)

My mom loves acupuncture, which is funny because she's a paediatrician, medical doctor, but she's also into that stuff. With eyesight, everything is connected.

 

Mason: (43:22)

Right, right.

 

Jake Steiner: (43:26)

I've been on podcasts where first the host is like, "Your topic has nothing to do with us." And I'm like, "Body, it's all one thing. It's all connected together." The thing that improves eyesight and makes the eyesight worse is close-up and glasses.

 

Mason: (43:40)

Yeah, right.

 

Jake Steiner: (43:40)

It's the main thing. If you want to fix that stuff and you just want to fix it, that will fix it. But there are lots of other things also. Trauma can absolutely affect your eyesight. I do blood tests two, three, four times a year because all this stuff works together. If you have messed up blood values, if you're lacking stuff, it's going to affect your eyesight also, definitely. Everything plays together. I'm just focusing on what's the way that's just going to fix it for most people in most cases.

 

Mason: (44:13)

Yeah, absolutely. And I like it. I get asked about eyesight a lot and I know there is that connection of the liver Meridian ending at the eyes and sight is that sense connected to the liver. But at the same time, sometimes I get people reporting an improvement in vision when they get onto certain liver herbs, but it's not... it's kind of like, "Yeah, but I can't..." What you were saying at the beginning, where's the actual, down to the wire, causality and do I know there's actually going to be enough of a connection there or there's not going to be all these other things in the way for most people that you're really not going to get that much improvement if you just get onto the herbs, but-

 

Jake Steiner: (44:52)

But try it. But try it. You know what I mean? Address the big elephant first. If you have screen addiction, no amount of herbs are going to fix your eyes. But if you're taking care of every else, I'm all for it. You know what I mean? Because especially because you can measure and you can experience and you can go, "Okay, what does this do?" And I'm not saying it doesn't. I'm a big fan because I'm into this topic. If you've got herbs for eye stuff, I'm like, "Send me herbs, I'll try some."

 

Mason: (45:18)

I'll send you the Beauty Blend because that's the only one with schizandra and goji in there that are known to bring brightness to the eyes. They go through and get the chi of the liver flowing. And a lot of the time what creates the tension is an excess of liver yang. And if there's an excess of liver yang, then what is regulated by that, the whole liver [inaudible 00:45:40] system is the peripheral nervous system as well. And so you're going to get a tightening up through the entire nervous system, lose that smooth flow in the muscle and a smooth flow of chi. And I can see you, there's probably a connection there with tension in the eye, but... Yeah?

 

Jake Steiner: (45:55)

That and floaters, people bring up a lot. People get floaters, don't know if [inaudible 00:46:01]... And especially in the forum, because we have such a wide audience I'm boring, because I'm just like, "Just give me the thing that works and how simple can I make it?" But at the same time I'm interested in these things, A, and B, there's a lot of audience that leans into a different direction from here than I do. You know what I mean? You talk to me about chi, I'm like, "I don't know. I don't know."

 

Mason: (46:28)

I don't know either. I think it's just fun thinking about it. [inaudible 00:46:30] with herbs, I don't offer any of these formulas, but just that the [Plerium 00:46:36] blends, like Free and Easy Wanderer, these are the herbs that smooth out the flow within the liver. That's the one I think for people, but like these plerium blends and formulas, I think would be really nice addition for a lot of people, especially to hopefully smooth out some of the excessive emotions that come out of the liver sometimes or with anything. In any process like this, I'm sure you see people go through all manner of emotional processes going through this.

 

Jake Steiner: (47:04)

For sure. And that's why I'm like, especially in the forum, there's a lot of people who are a lot more into this side of the topic who would love that kind of stuff. You know what I mean? And I'm super open-minded about, "I'm not right, I just figured out one little sliver of one little thing. You have a whole other thing." And I'm learning. There's so much interesting stuff that people figured out that isn't mainstream, isn't easily packaged and sold in every grocery store. You know what I mean? I like to make that connection. So if you have stuff like that, I'm always interested.

 

Mason: (47:40)

Definitely send you some Beauty Blend, man, couple of other things. But I mean, as I said, I like having this, a podcast resource like this, because when we get asked, it makes me feel so much more secure and comfortable going, "Yeah, hit this first." And then you start adding in all the other things and it just becomes this massive bonus. But there's an actual technique here that's somewhat proven, anecdotally even, with tens of thousands of people at this point, which is nice to have anecdotal evidence getting to those numbers. And then can't hurt, can't hurt, add the Beauty Blend in there, get the liver chi flowing. The ancient Taoists said that this is how you keep the eyes sparkling. It sounds fun. Other good shit's going to happen when you're doing it anyway, so just go and enjoy yourself.

 

Jake Steiner: (48:32)

And also speaking of herbs, I have a house in Myanmar, which is currently not in a good situation, but they only do herb stuff. They use this stuff on their skin, right? They draw these circles on their skin with bark, it's bark from some kind of tree. You do not get sunburned. Your skin doesn't even get dark. Everybody uses it. It is some magic stuff. And it would put sunscreen companies out of business, because it's a tree bark, you just rub it up, you put it on your skin. It looks cool. It keeps your skin smooth. No sunburns.

 

Mason: (49:08)

Wow.

 

Jake Steiner: (49:09)

It is amazing. Yeah. And all Burmese, that's how you can recognise Burmese people in Thailand because they draw these things on themselves. But that's that tree bark. And they've got this for all kinds of different things there. And because I live there and I have a fully off-grid house, and when I get... something funky happens, they always bring out some herbs and the herbs always work. So I've learned like there's certainly an art there that's getting lost a little bit in our pharmaceutical world.

 

Mason: (49:39)

Yeah. It's called thanaka, T-H-A-N-A-K-A, apparently.

 

Jake Steiner: (49:45)

Yeah, that's right.

 

Mason: (49:45)

Is that it?

 

Jake Steiner: (49:45)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

 

Mason: (49:46)

Yeah, cool.

 

Jake Steiner: (49:46)

Yep.

 

Mason: (49:47)

Looks amazing. I mean, I'd love a lot of those... Yeah, look at it. Look at the designs that they pop on their checks, everyone going like... Yeah, if you just write, if you write thanaka, or I've just written Myanmar bark sunscreen and then gone to images. Beautiful. It looks great. That's the goal. Because here, that's what we do with... we had an auntie up north who's from [Moranbah 00:50:13], and she's just like, "Yeah, use ochre. That's what you guys should be using. You just put ochre all over you." And so when got it, just pop that on our daughter. It doesn't like... sunscreen, we weren't going to use like a zinc based anyway, but it's so more badass as well.

 

Jake Steiner: (50:28)

That stuff is cool. And people use it. This is not an old ancient thing that is no longer in use. Right now, you go to some island in Thailand, you want to figure out which are Thai people are Burmese, look for the ones that have things drawn on them. It's cute.

 

Mason: (50:44)

Man, this has been so rad. I hope people jump over to your website. Easiest way for them to find you?

 

Jake Steiner: (50:52)

Endmyopia.org.

 

Mason: (50:56)

Endmyopia.org. You do have a crap load of resources on there.

 

Jake Steiner: (51:03)

It's many years of stuff.

 

Mason: (51:07)

I can tell. A lot of resources. There's apps there. Gosh, I mean, Shortsighted Podcast in there. I mean, yeah, I can see you've got a Discord going as well. Is that still happening?

 

Jake Steiner: (51:23)

Yeah. A lot of that stuff is community stuff. I'm not on Discord much, but somebody said we need Discord, and so yeah, they're talking on there.

 

Mason: (51:33)

It's a movement, you can tell. You've started a movement, which is awesome. It must feel good. I hope you feel good.

 

Jake Steiner: (51:39)

Yeah. I feel like an imposter mostly. It's weird for me to be the... You know what I mean? If I had a cool beard for a start, then you know-

 

Mason: (51:47)

Maybe. Maybe that's the first... because it's the same thing. In all only imposter stuff it's the same as the eyesight, it's just environmental. It's just what you're putting around yourself and what you're saying to yourself, it's a process. I kind of still feel it. I recently just figured my way through it and finding my place in the whole herbal world and the health education world. I had to just embrace a little bit more of my full spectrum of self. Like a full spectrum of eyesight. I had to kind of get a little bit more into my comedy career, put less pressure on myself to kind of be a know-it-all in the health and herbal space. And I feel like I'm slowly have an appropriate... All of a sudden that impostor feeling has an evolution to being a much more appropriate emotion or feeling that actually gets some momentum behind me rather than... I definitely know that feeling of being stuck in that... Excessively.

 

Jake Steiner: (52:41)

If you have suggestions, I always welcome them because that's definitely a weird problem I have. Because it feels like I can't possibly be that dude. You know what I mean? There's a lot of jokes on the site. I constantly joke about my imaginary beard and being the last living eye guru. Because I'm like, how is it possible? It continues to be the thing and I like talking about it and I think it's important. But at the same time it should be somebody more wise or with the right titles or something.

 

Mason: (53:08)

Yeah. For me, I was always in the back of my mind... it wasn't an actual threat. I was just like, I was worried, I knew the things, I could call the things out about myself that were gaps in my knowledge and where I knew that potentially someone could... there was a in my armour and someone could call out my lack of experience in this element of what I do or in this element of what I do. And I've had it in the past when I've been a bit more overt and bravado about my expertise, which weren't there and had that person who was a big gift now, but you know, kind of whack me down on social media and be like, "Here, how about some facts? You want to back it up? You want to be able to do this, then let's go at it." And I'd get really angry and, "How dare you pull me down?" And then my housemate at the time was like, I was telling her, I was venting about it. And she was like, "Oh wow, this guy's really helping you sharpen your pencil. You're really reacting to this and showing your hole." And I was like, "Oh, shit. Yeah, they're definitely... Yes."

 

Jake Steiner: (54:09)

I love those. I love those. Especially in the forum. I don't sensor stuff. So when people come and say... There's a thread in there now of some guy who said he got massive amounts of floaters and I didn't say it and it was because of me, and I welcome those because whatever my imposter feeling is, I'm like, please do point it out. Just bring it. You know what I mean? Because it's such a weird topic. Nobody needs these things in front of their eyes and it makes us less... it makes us timid and it makes us hide behind screens and books and it stops us from expressing and experiencing and I am not the dude to tell that story, in a way. Right? Because I'm just a dude.

 

Mason: (54:51)

Well, but you obviously are. I don't know. I reckon you're probably on the path anyway and something will pop eventually. Because you're calling yourself out. As long as you're calling yourself out in a progressive... in a way that it progresses forward. That was my big thing. I started pulling all the herbalists and the acupuncturists onto the podcast and I just-

 

Jake Steiner: (55:10)

Oh, cool.

 

Mason: (55:11)

... started owning my position. I started owning my shortcomings, all the things I thought if I kind of admitted to and mentioned that everyone would just go, "You're a fraud." And everyone was like, "Yeah, we know mate. We know you're only this." And I'm just like, "Yeah, I'm just the herbal scallywag and I'm making my own formulations. And I work within tonic herbs, which are super easy." Everyone can do it. I have a certain amount of experience, I understand patterns, I understand how to formulate, I understand how to source because that's just my passion. I used to call myself out in a really self-deprecating way and I used to kind of joke about it, I'd be like, "Yeah, I can't do this and I can't do that."

 

Mason: (55:49)

Now, I feel like I'm more in a position where I'm just like, " I need to put boundaries up, need to have good boundaries around my capacity and make sure that I state what my capacity is and my want. I'm not going to go and study more. So don't expect any more from me than this." And then I just kind of went into cultivation and within those boundaries, I just owned it. This is who I am, having so much fun doing this and I'll go to the experts and I just started... like you do as well I guess, just started, "Well, I don't know that bit. I actually don't know how to answer that bit, but I'm going to start pulling in experts and start getting really curious."

 

Mason: (56:28)

I started getting really curious and started becoming a student again. I really owned my expertise and what I do well, and it's like, "Screw it. I'm going to own it." I'm sure I can feel a lot of relatedness with you there. And then going off and going, "I'm going to continue to learn." And yeah, I'm just going to continue to learn. Be a student.

 

Jake Steiner: (56:45)

I like that. And I like that, especially because I think we spend so much time online with these things is trying to figure out where's the scam, where's the catch? That's always my first thing. I'm like, "Ah, what is this crap about now?" I really like when somebody goes, "Let me just tell you." Like, when you said this is my expertise and this is the limit of it, I'm like, I'm already a fan. Because you're not forcing me to go find a whole... because you're not happy until you go, "What's the real..." Everything has a certain amount of bullshit in it. I do that probably too much, because I'm probably... People who randomly show up at the website are like, "What is with this fool?" But I'm like the librarian of this thing. People bring what works and what doesn't work and I just collect it all and I put it all in one place and that's it, right?

 

Mason: (57:41)

I feel you, man. It's a trippy feeling knowing that there's like... when you start getting like website traffic and you start knowing there's heaps more people having that initial reaction, "What the hell is this?" I tripped out about that a lot and wanted to control that a lot. That's kind of shifted. I just started getting into more comedy stuff on my personal Instagram, and that kind of, for some reason that just alleviated the pressure valve for me. And that was where I got to practise going, "All right, they're going to come and they're going to see this, and this is the one thing they're going to see and they might not get the whole backstory and I haven't had time to explain myself and that..." I'm going, "All, I'm going to just accept it. This is me being vulnerable." And so I just started becoming really prolific, for me anyway, prolific in that rather than perfect. And it-

 

Jake Steiner: (58:32)

I want to see that. I got to go check that out. I like it. Yeah.

 

Mason: (58:38)

masonjtaylor.com. No, masonjtaylor, @masonjtaylor. Masonjtaylor.com, don't go there anyone, that website is very out of date.

 

Jake Steiner: (58:45)

That's cool. I like that. Especially when you're like, "I didn't explain it clearly." I think there's something to just letting go of some of the veil of perfection and just being like, "I'm making a thing and it's an ongoing experiment in evolving it, making it better."

 

Mason: (59:04)

I think it'd be really nice for it to happen more and more. Because I mean, you've provided so much, it'd be nice to see... it would have to go. I'm sure every business or offering or charity or whatever it is, it's always going hit a point where it's like, "All right, things need to change. And it needs to take on a new way of being... new way of being structured or professional," or whatever it is. I can imagine yours is with that many people behind it, you could step it up and take it to another level. It's just going, "All right, cool. Do we just sit, let it be here or do we jump into the unknown once again and take it forward?" Either way, I think the resources and the offering is magic. It'd be awesome to see it continue to evolve and grow into the world so people can have that place and make this more of a norm, make the knowledge more of a norm and the insight that you can actually restore your vision, a norm as well.

 

Jake Steiner: (01:00:02)

Yeah. Just be happy, the people that listen to your podcast and enjoy your approach, to maybe look at their eyes and go, "Maybe I'll take care of these things a little bit."

 

Mason: (01:00:16)

We're doing all HR stuff and at the moment, like that's where our structure is coming in, bringing more and more love to everyone working in the business and this is the one of the resources... we have blue blocker glasses and things that people can wear, but just start putting this... because we're growing, put this into the fabric of the... a bit more into the fabric of the workflow. And for everyone, taking pride and this leads a little distinctions of how to ensure that our eyeball doesn't become elongated and we don't start deteriorating the health of the fluid within it, and just these little things you've mentioned, it's just like, bang, I'm on. I'm on. I'm implementing that right now. Some people are wearing glasses, I'm going to send them this just as an option. But for those that don't... I feel it right now, I've been staring at the screen all day. I'm like, "Jeez, the blurriness."

 

Jake Steiner: (01:01:09)

Buy an eye chart. Buy an eye chart. Hang it up somewhere in your house, and just mark a spot that's the right distance from it. And sometimes when you walk past it, just stop there and look at it. And start noticing how that goes up and down. Because that prompts action, then you're like, "Well, maybe I'm going to not do four hours, maybe three hours." Because there's also a time where the muscle starts to lock up, for me that is three hours. I spend more than three hours in front of a screen, I can't see the small line on the eye chart anymore.

 

Mason: (01:01:38)

Wow.

 

Jake Steiner: (01:01:39)

The muscle just locked up. And then if I take an hour walk, I can see that line again. So I know what my screen limit is before that muscle just gets stuck for the rest of the day. An eye chart is super handy just as a quick reference of, can you read the thing still or can't you.

 

Mason: (01:01:56)

I mean that immediate feedback, as well. Where do we get the eye chart? Is that just something we purchase in our local area?

 

Jake Steiner: (01:02:04)

Yeah, or you can print it out. I have some somewhere, but I don't know where. It should be easy to get, just buy it online somewhere.

 

Mason: (01:02:11)

We'll have a look, see if we can find it on your site and put it in the resources for the podcast, otherwise like you said, I'm sure it's just one of those things that's easy to order online. But that's good. I'm definitely doing that. I'm going to put that up at the office as well. And this is what motivation it is to get intentional about your work and actually start doing deep work. Don't just hover around on the screens, adding another hour on. Get some efficiency to what you're doing, so you don't... and then see the difference that that makes in your eyesight. Wonderful. I love it, man. Thank you so much.

 

Jake Steiner: (01:02:46)

Awesome. I appreciate all your time, Mason. It's super cool.

 

Mason: (01:02:49)

Likewise. Bangkok's four hours... gosh, behind us? What time-

 

Jake Steiner: (01:02:58)

It's noon right now.

 

Mason: (01:03:00)

Yeah, three hours behind. Yeah, cool. Well, enjoy the Bangkok afternoon.

 

Jake Steiner: (01:03:06)

Yes. I'm going to go for a ride.

 

Mason: (01:03:08)

Yeah, do it.

 

Jake Steiner: (01:03:09)

Speedy ride through the city.

 

Mason: (01:03:12)

Nothing better. Enjoy man. Hope to see your face again soon.

 

Jake Steiner: (01:03:17)

That'd be awesome. Thanks, Mason.

 

Mason: (01:03:19)

See you, man.

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Earth Medicine and The Gateway of Healing with Asia Suler (EP#136)

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Earth Medicine and The Gateway of Healing with Asia Suler (EP#136)